5981

I agree. Scratching my head as to why that’s aimed at me.

5982

QFT.

This might sound a little weird, but I never believed WoW’s success was due to being “a better MMO.” By that, I mean that I don’t think 10 million people were hungry for a better Ultima or EverQuest; in fact, I don’t think a lot of WoW’s playerbase were even looking for an MMO in the first place.

I think WoW’s overwhelming success was because Blizzard built a wonderfully open-ended game that, while technically an MMO, could just as easily be approached as a single-player RPG with 400-500 hours of content. Anchored by questing and exploration, you could tailor the experience to your liking: join a guild or not, run dungeons or not, interact with other players or not, it was your call how much MMO you let in your WoW. And while the questing may not have been perfect, it was just non-grindy enough that you always wanted to keep going, to hit the next level and see the next zone.

So when people discuss why no one’s been able to topple WoW, I think it’s pretty simple: the game’s success was anchored by its quest content, something no one’s really been able to match before or since. If any game has any chance of repeating that success, I’m hoping The Old Republic will do so. Otherwise, it’ll probably be whatever Blizzard’s next MMO is, which you know they’re going to try and stockpile a massive amount of launch content for.

5983

Out of genuine curiosity, what exactly do you do when playing WoW single player? Certainly for me after about 8 hours of turning in antelope hides I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I ended up just quiting.

5984

8 hours to collect and turn in antelope hides? No wonder you got bored. :)

In all seriousness, I can’t speak for Mark, but for me, vanilla WoW was just non-grindy enough that I always wanted to keep plugging away. With every quest, you got some gold and XP and a little bit of story, but more importantly, you got to uncover a little more of the world, which was what I was really interested in. You always wanted to see what came next, and questing was paced just well enough that you never felt like you were stuck in one place for too long.

Technically, I didn’t play vanilla WoW as a single-player game. I was in a small F&F guild where there were usually a few people online to chat with, and there were a few zones that I cleared with friends. But I spent a lot my initial 1-60 climb playing solo, and it was the exploration aspect that primarily drove it.

5985

I can see that, and the game definitely seemed to be pushing me forward. However everytime I was sent to a new place the person I was told to talk to inevitably wanted me to retrieve 6 moose snouts (or just kill 5 wombats, but that’s bretty much the same thing).

After a while I didn’t want to go anymore, cuase fucking find your own beaver knuckles you lazy sack of NPC.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, maybe a multiplayer Oblivion or something. Or at least being sent off against some giant cool mythical wyverns or something.

5986

Well, you confirmed my suspicion. You weren’t referring to an actual game, you were describing an abstract perfect MMO that you think can be made. I’m not convinced the perfect MMO is possible at this stage (or at all, given online human nature), and your claim that everyone sucks at making them because your expectations aren’t yet met is a bit unfair.

That said, I wasn’t feeling hostile when I typed the question. Just curious.

5987

That’s slightly ridiculous, Rick. At no point was I asking for perfection. It’s just that having played RIFT, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Darkfall, some Vanguard, and plenty of others I can’t remember right now I can point to a multitude of problems with each - many of which should be things that never ever get exposed to the paying public after beta. Even EVE, which has been around for a long time, is completely different to DikuMUD MMOs, and is actively developed has a host of issues that are seemingly ignored by the developers.

I’m not pining for the perfect game. I’d happily settle for “quite good, not going to make me want to gouge my eyes out in frustration”. RIFT came closest because of the amount of polish but took pretty much no risks with the design as a result. I don’t think I’m asking for too much.

5988

This was my first reaction when I came over from GW. I found a lot of the quests to be very generic. It’s gotten a lot better since cata though IMO. Still, what I eventually found what I enjoyed most was end game raiding. Try some LFD dungeons starting at level 15. It will give you a tiny taste of what raiding is sort of like. It’s my preferred way to level a toon now. I just queue up dungeon after dungeon. Queue times are usually pretty short at these lower levels even as dps.

That’s the great thing about wow. There are so many ways to experience it. If 5 man instances aren’t your thing maybe give pvp a try.

5989

So I’m starting to get the idea that this game is kinda all things to all people, and that you sorta have to go out there and find your fun. I guess that’s a cool idea, I’m just not sure I have the paitence for it.

I suppose I will find out when I try again with a friend.

And Arogan…I think I will at least play until I can do a raid. I’m not sure what it’s like, but it sounds most like what I wanted WoW to be: Teaming up with other adventures to go kill giant baddies (hopefully in an open world).

5990

No, just compliance with that vision in your head.

5991

What the hell?

I’ll try one more time, though you do seem to be cherry picking a single line from my posts and responding to that so I’m probably wasting my time.

WAR, Age of Conan, Darkfall, RIFT, etc - go read the threads. Go read the complaints. Go read the praise for the ideas they they had, and the admission that they screwed the pooch on several important points. The vast majority of people do not like these games (and I feel bad about including RIFT as it’s the most polished of the bunch) and this is for a reason. Most of them are clunky, surprisingly ugly, unfinished, and buggy.

Am I asking for perfection when I criticise that? I don’t think so.

5992

Yeah, this for the most part. It was fun uncovering new parts of the world, doing the quests there. It’s not as if I played it solo all the time, either. There were often chance groupings when I’d be questing somewhere and someone on the same quests was there and we’d group. And I ran some of the dungeons and that took groups.

Even when you’re soloing, it’s a social game. You can guild chat. You can chat in the general channel. You see other players running around. You may be soloing, but it doesn’t feel like a single-player game. It feels like a game world with other players in it. You just aren’t grouped with anyone else many times. And I play on a PvP server, so there’s always that aspect of it.

I will really have to be enthralled by a new MMO to play to the level cap if that means spending 150 hours leveling. I’d rather cycle in and out of WoW to get my MMO itch scratched, though I plan on playing a few F2P MMOs to check them out.

5993

It’s a bit pedantic, but I wonder if you truly find the game less enjoyable, or if instead you simply find it less accessible.

I’m continually struck by the fact, whenever I play WoW, that I simply don’t give a damn about 99% of the people in my immediate vicinity. On EQ I knew which players were the type that I could run to if in trouble and get help from, which were likely to do nasty things to me if I stood in their way, etc… I felt far more involved.

This isn’t to say that I prefer playing EQ these days. I don’t. I quit EQ quite a while back because I could no longer access the game. My time was limited enough that I couldn’t keep up with the demands necessary to continue to play the game in an enjoyable fashion, and that frustration was greater than the joy the game gave me. But when you talk about forced grouping being a bad game design, I still don’t feel that way. I think it led to far greater involvement and investment in that game, but that it was also a double-edged sword.

To me, WoW is essentially the BigFish of the MMO world. I can dip my toes in and play around a bit and it’s generally pleasant if not overwhelmingly nifty, and that works far better with my schedule. But I’ve only very rarely had an experience in WoW which came anywhere near the highs I experienced in EQ (and I’ve experienced the very same lows in WoW, multiple times.)

In short, I found EQ more enjoyable but it’s something I can’t access any more. I found WoW less enjoyable, but it’s still accessible and it is still enjoyable (just not to the same degree) so they’re still getting my money.

5994

As you stated:

But you stated that without giving an objective definition of a good MMO. And you wouldn’t provide a definition beyond “everything’s inferior and even the few good ideas aren’t implemented well.” That’s not particularly helpful. You indicated a belief that the most successful one is not a good MMO. What is? What benchmarks should apply? Does a good MMO actually exist? Or are you just a chronic condemner of things?

Personally, I’m amazed that any MMO works at all, or that it can appeal to more than the obsessive completionist segment of the population.

5995

I think the fact that it defaulted me to a pretty vacant server may have hurt my experience in this regard. After 8 hours I had only seen about a dozen or so player chracters. It just didn’t really fel like a populated place.

5996

The changes in WoW’s mechanics over the years have concentrated the population in certain areas. Aside from people gathering materials for professions (herbalism, mining, etc) and others doing achievements, there’s little reason for most players to leave the main cities. You can find your heroics, join your PvP groups and the like without leaving Stormwind or Orgrimmar. Seven months into the expansion, the only people around you will be people working on alts and the occasional truly new player. The emphasis on phased questlines in this latest expansion has made the zones feel even less populated.

5997

If you’ve been reading my posts in this thread, I’d like you to point out where I said WoW is a bad MMO. Particularly as I spent a few pages arguing that its popularity and the great design go hand in hand. I have, however, stated that I think it’s reaching the end of its life. Nor do I think it is “perfect”.

WoW at launch - years and years ago - was head and shoulders a better experience for the new player than anything on the market. That remains true for nearly every MMO that’s been released since then, and while that says something about Blizzard’s quality it’s also an indictment on the teams who developed WoW’s competitors.

Take WAR, for example. I beta tested this game. We gave extensive feedback on what we were allowed to test. WAR is at heart a PVP (RVR) game, set in the hugely popular Warhammer world. It had a rabid fanbase ready and willing to give it a chance because of that and because of the link with DAOC. Yet it launched as a horrendously buggy mess, with piss-poor PVE, and with a chronic and specific problem - the utter grind at Tier 3 that saw pretty much everyone hit a brick wall in their progress. Class balance was a mess. Animation quality was all over the shop, as was engine performance. Open world RVR rewarded not actually fighting and instead playing capture tag across the map. The whole raison d’etre of the game became its #1 problem.

And yet we all wanted it to succeed. Why? Because it had great ideas. It just implemented most of them so badly.

Take Age of Conan. This game was stunning. It also had something new - an early introduction (the first 20 levels) which alternated between “MMO” and story-driven single-player. Those first 20 levels were hugely impressive the first time you played it. It also had a new and interesting take on melee combat, featuring multi-key combos and the requirement of actually hitting your enemy rather than just pressing ‘2’. This game had such promise. Then you got out of Tortage and discovered the rest of the game was mostly populated by random patrolling mobs, a lack of quests, and some very poorly tuned instances.

And unfortunately, just like WAR, the selling points turned out to be negatives. That innovative melee system was a detriment in PVP [I have no idea if they fixed this] as players could easily avoid the combos. Tortage was great the first time round, but having to do it all again for every character was quickly tedious. The game was buggy, unfinished, and a lot of people saw it as an outright con. Yet it had some great ideas. Just poorly implemented.

Criticising these games is not holding them up to an impossible standard, Rick. They are not great games. There’s fun to be had in them, for sure, but there’s also an awful lot of problems, be they technical, visual, or design. And once an MMO loses that playerbase, it’s very very hard for it to regain it.

I keep referring to RIFT. I have not been impressed by an MMO so much since WoW. RIFT launched as a mostly bug-free WoW clone that did several things much better than WoW. It came with a modern UI, with a complex and interesting class system, and an innovative dynamic events system (the Rifts themselves) that made the typical MMO experience into something genuinely entertaining even for someone who’s completed an uncountable number of quests. Was it perfect? No. My complaint is that ultimately they stuck too close to the WoW paradigm and as I understand it the endgame is pretty much WoW except without as much content. However, they should still be held up as an example of the standard a modern MMO should hit on release, and I hope this stays a successful game.

5998

A magnificent post. I am otherwise speechless.

5999

Well trolled, Rick, well trolled.

6000

Some of the great moments in EQ were truly great, but the game was too frustrating. Who can forget staring at a screen that was an open spellbook for minutes at a time, and not being able to alt-tab to check email? Who can forget waiting for a boat for 20 minutes, going to a new zone, and then waiting another 30 minutes to find a player willing to bind you?

I don’t think any of us would go back. It had great moments, but we didn’t know of a better game.

There were some thrilling moments in EQ, but I’d say they were due more to the real chance of losing something – XP, money, and gear. You could add that to a game like WoW. Will they? No, because it would drive players away.

I guess what I’m saying is that WoW overall is a superior game, but there are elements of EQ you could add to WoW that would appeal to some hardcore players.